Artnews

March 2006

Altered States

As the end of black-and-white printing signals a transformation in the
practice of photography, the medium itself is more popular than ever
By Richard B. Woodward

T he year 2005 may be remembered as a watershed in the history of
photography, a crucial date when one generation of artists lifted off into
blue sky while another was brought down to earth, left once again to ponder
its slave-master relationship to technology.

When Kodak announced last June that it would no longer manufacture
black-and-white printing papers, the decision did more than terminate 117
years of production. By severing a vital supply line long taken for granted,
the company reminded photographers of their humbling dependence on equipment
and materials—and how quickly both they and the equipment and materials can
go out of date. Painters endure regular critical warnings that brushing
pigment on canvas is irrelevant, but at least they can work their entire
lives without fear of their basic tools becoming obsolete.

“I’d been expecting it but not quite believing it would come to pass,” says
photographer Tod Papageorge, who, at 66, can’t remember a time when Kodak
Polycontrast paper didn’t exist.

The gloomy tidings from Rochester were followed a few months later by news
that Agfa was bankrupt. For artists who had regarded the German company as a
buffer against the hegemony of Kodak, this announcement provoked an even
deeper crisis. “I can’t tell you how many panicked e-mails I received asking
me if I knew where to find Agfa fiber papers,” says Lesley A. Martin,
executive book editor of the Aperture Foundation. Those who had relied on
Ilford were able to counsel the bereaved: the world’s largest manufacturer
of black-and-white papers had already gone bankrupt in 2004.

All this red ink splashed across the business pages only confirmed what
analysts had predicted for more than a decade: the future of photography is
no longer controlled by makers of paper, film, darkroom chemicals, and
enlargers, but by Intel, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Epson, and the information
companies. Still, the prospect of giant corporations on their knees before
the new rulers of the digital age was a sobering lesson.

For those who scan their images instead of making contact sheets, and who in
overwhelming numbers prefer to shoot and print in color rather than in
monochrome, the crumbling of the industrial order has been far less
traumatic. Besides, other signs indicate that the state of photography is
decidedly healthy, especially when it comes to the acceptance of the medium
outside its own borders.

Photographers are orbiting closer to the magnetic core of the art world than
ever before. Collectors are willing to pay higher and higher prices for
prized images. At Christie’s contemporary-art sales in November, Richard
Prince’s 1989 Untitled (Cowboy) sold for $1.2 million, a record for a
photograph at auction and one of the highest prices ever achieved by any
youngish (Prince is 56) living artist.

“You can’t have a show about contemporary art anymore without having
photography as a central element,” says Sandra Phillips, director of the
photography department at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Art
photographers are now gossiped about on television, with Cindy Sherman and
Gregory Crewdson rating mentions by the snarky art students in the HBO
series Six Feet Under. Larry Gagosian has added Alec Soth and Sally Mann to
his roster of heavyweights.

For the computer literate, the benefits of digitization have been huge.
Every ambitious photographer, with or without a gallery, has a Web site. The
unclogging of the editorial bottleneck, a problem that until the late ’90s
prevented most images from being widely disseminated, has transformed how
picture magazines make assignments and museums review portfolios.

At the same time, the globalization of images afforded by the Internet seems
only to have heightened the urge felt by many artists to frame work for
galleries and organize it in books. The recent explosion in the number of
photography titles can be seen in part as a result of—and a reaction
against—the expanding digital universe. Computer scans and desktop layouts
have slashed production costs, lowering the barriers to publishing. But with
billions of images floating around the Web and on cell phones, there seems
to be an even more pressing desire to ground them on sheets of paper.

Darius Himes, book editor for Photo-Eye, a quarterly based in Santa Fe, has
watched the surge in photography books and estimates that he now has to
choose from among 300 for review every year—“important, interesting, or
beautiful books, not coffee-table books,” he emphasizes.

Impressive boutique operations in the United States and Europe—Blindspot,
Boot, D.A.P., Nazraeli, Parkett, powerHouse, Steidl, Trolley, Twelvetrees,
Twin Palms, Umbrage, and a rejuvenated Aperture—as well as Osiris in Japan,
are pumping out serious photography titles at a pace that matches, or
exceeds, the output from M.I.T., Yale, New Mexico, California, and other
university presses, and from the more established art publishers Abrams,
Bulfinch, Phaidon, Prestel, Rizzoli, Taschen, and Thames & Hudson. Himes
believes that editors at several of these smaller houses have become
curators of sorts. “You can see their tastes and interests in the lists they
develop over the years,” he says.

The history of photography, unlike that of painting and sculpture, is bound
up, literally and figuratively, with books. William Henry Fox Talbot, Jacob
Riis, Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Lee
Friedlander, Larry Clark, William Eggleston, and Nan Goldin are only a few
of the artists whose original prints have exercised far less influence than
the reproductions in their books.

Museums and publishers in recent years have underlined this distinct aspect
of the medium with a series of exhibitions and catalogues devoted to books
with photographs. The publication in 2001 of The Book of 101 Books: Seminal
Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century, edited by New York book dealer
Andrew Roth and published by Roth Horowitz, was topped in 2004 by the even
more comprehensive first volume of The Photobook: A History, by photographer
Martin Parr and critic Gerry Badger, published by Phaidon. Last summer, New
York’s International Center of Photography continued the trend with the
exhibition “The Open Book: A History of the Photographic Book from 1878 to
the Present,” produced by Hasselblad.

Daile Kaplan at Swann Galleries in New York, where records for photographic
books have routinely fallen lately (the French edition of Hans Bellmer’s
1936 La Poupée, for example, fetched $41,400 in December), says that the
Roth and Parr/Badger histories have stimulated a “crossover interest for
out-of-print photographically illustrated books among photograph
collectors.”

Business considerations may also be behind the dramatic growth in new
titles. Books are increasingly being financed by artists themselves (or
their dealers) as a career investment. “A book is a calling card that’s
harder for people to throw away,” one young photographer says. Publishing a
monograph is seen as a necessary step toward exhibition in a gallery, and
today’s young photography students are nothing if not market savvy.

Collectors of contemporary art have shown themselves willing to pay high
prices for photographs ever since the spring 2000 auction at Sotheby’s New
York, when Cindy Sherman’s 1989 Untitled (#209) sold for a stunning
$269,750. Last year, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s 1999 Henry VIII (in seven parts)
went for $744,000 at Christie’s contemporary sale in November, elevating the
artist into the company of Thomas Demand, Rineke Dijkstra, Robert Frank,
Goldin, Andreas Gursky, Irving Penn, Prince, Sherman, Thomas Struth, and
Jeff Wall, each of whom has sold a photograph at auction for more than
$150,000.

New York dealer Lucy Mitchell-Innes, who ran the contemporary-art department
at Sotheby’s in the 1980s, has observed that the multiple nature of
photographic prints no longer bothers collectors. “People now want to own
pictures that other people own,” she says. “That’s a major shift, and
photography is one reason why.”

The record-breaking Prince photograph was not a unique print. Number one in
an edition of two, the large (50 by 70 inches), grainy reproduction of a
Marlboro ad was well known, having been reprinted many times. Whether or not
one accepts the critical argument that the photo is a telling commentary on
American advertising and the mythology of the cowboy in the American male
psyche, the market has declared that a photograph made in 1989 can be as
valuable as a painting by a young artist from the same period.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the image, other than its hammer
price, is how out of sync, how ’80s it looks compared to most 21st-century
work. Almost the size of a Gursky, the Ektacolor print lacks the vivid
sharpness that digital enhancement has made commonplace. The rephotography
movement, of which Prince and Sherrie Levine were exemplars, seems quaintly
historic now—even a little drab. Superseded by more eye-catching trends,
their images are the products of antiquated technology and a time when the
question of what constitutes originality in photography was a burning
theoretical issue.

Fashions in photographic practice are not yet as evanescent as elsewhere in
contemporary art, but new figures and styles are surfacing—or resurfacing.
The theatrical tableaux that were popular among students a few years ago are
giving way to personal documentary again. It’s a trend that Peter Galassi,
curator of photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, identified back
in 1991 with his “Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort” show and one
that Martin of Aperture would now like to call—with an apologetic laugh—the
“New Docugraphics.”

“A younger group has adopted the cool, objective approach of the New
Topographics photographers from the ’70s to document intimate scenarios and
make sociological observations instead of purely geographic or environmental
ones,” Martin says. Her nominees for membership in this club, which favors
medium- and large-format cameras for the crisp detail their negatives can
provide, include Tim Davis, Doug DuBois, Jessica Todd Harper, LISA KERESZI,
Gillian Laub, An-my Lê, Darrin Mickey, Matthew Monteith, Nicholas Prior,
Taryn Simon, and Brian Ulrich.

“I don’t see as much staged photography anymore,” agrees Doug Eklund,
assistant curator in the department of photographs at New York’s
Metropolitan Museum of Art. “William Eggleston and Stephen Shore and Joel
Sternfeld have put their stamp on the young people whose work comes through
here and that I see in galleries. It’s interesting that Shore and Sternfeld
are artists who were looked at seriously by Gursky—so it’s come full
circle.”

For the generation of artists under 40 who have worked with Photoshop for
most of their adult lives, notions of purity in practice are largely passé.
Many now gravitate toward digitally altered work. “My students at the moment
are interested in artists like Kelli Connell, who uses a computer to make a
digital lesbian twin of herself,” says Rod Slemmons, a teacher at Columbia
College in Chicago and director of the school’s Museum of Contemporary
Photography. Aperture will publish a monograph devoted to Connell this fall.
Likewise, Barry Frydlender’s large, digitally manipulated image of a flooded
street in Tel Aviv, prominently displayed in MoMA’s “New Acquisitions” show
last year, aroused as much comment as the more traditional, less digitized
work by Carlos Garaicoa, Phillip Pisciotta, Robin Rhode, or Bertien van
Manen in the latest installment of the museum’s “New Photography” series,
which was revived after a seven-year hiatus.

The public’s interest in what photographers are up to has not yet peaked if
the number of surveys of the subject is any measure. Susan Bright’s Art
Photography Now (Aperture, 2005) follows on the heels of Charlotte Cotton’s
The Photograph as Contemporary Art (Thames & Hudson, 2004) and David
Campany’s Art and Photography (Phaidon, 2003).

Bright’s sampling of 80 photographers—from Sternfeld, Gursky, and Demand to
Philip-Lorca di Corcia, Katy Grannan, and Justine Kurland—captures the range
of styles exhibited in galleries and museums in the United States and Europe
over the past five years. But the independent British curator and critic
senses that the mood is shifting again, thanks in part to technology—“I
think there’s anxiety about digitization,” she says—and in part to the
swinging pendulum of taste: “We’re coming out of ten years when big color
and big prints were the norm.”

Bright predicts a revival of black-and-white photography, citing the work of
Shannon Ebner and Markéta Othová, neither of whom is represented in her
book. “Their work is quite poignant, not staged, and they make smallish
prints,” she says. “There’s a desire to return to modernist esthetics, to
what photography used to be and how we imagine it should be.”

Traditional black-and-white still dominates the fine-art photography auction
market. Of the 241 lots sold last year for a total of almost $16 million at
Sotheby’s New York, department head Denise Bethel estimates that less than
10 percent were color prints. Collectors still balk when offered digital
prints of any kind.

For living artists, though, nostalgia is not a long-term option. Papageorge
has never made an exhibition-quality ink-jet print, and examples produced by
his graduate students at Yale have yet in his eyes to “reach the level of
poetry.”

But like most of his contemporaries (except Friedlander, who has stockpiled
hundreds of boxes of his favorite paper), Papageorge lacks the freezer space
to be a Kodak survivalist. He recently bought an Epson printer and realizes
that he had better master it quickly. Film will likely be the next to
vanish, if the rest of the industry follows the example of Nikon, which
announced in January that it will stop production of most film cameras, and
Konica Minolta, which said it would withdraw from the camera and color film
business.

The choices confronting photographers in 2006 are stark. From now on, adapt
or be left behind.

Richard B. Woodward is an arts critic based in New York.